Iron work his burning passion

Juan Trujillo, 86, did iron work among several other jobs at the Holcim cement plant west of Pueblo, where he worked from the age of 16 to 59.

After retiring in 1986, he began doing iron work on the side from his home.

A potbelly stove that he was throwing out was sitting in his iron scrap yard one day and a man asked him if he wanted to sell it.

“I had bought it to put in my shop, but decided something else would work better,” Trujillo said.

“I sold it to him. He took it home, cleaned it and painted it and later showed me a picture of it and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do.’ ”

He’s been restoring potbelly stoves ever since.

The stoves were specifically designed to heat large, open areas and were typically found in one-room schoolhouses, train stations or barns. The name comes from the stoves’ similarity to a fat man’s potbelly.

Trujillo has restored more than 100 stoves over the years and has a story for each one of them.

“I done a lot of stoves,” Trujillo said, using an old tape measure to point at a collage of pictures of his work.

In the late 1980s, Trujillo started advertising for his new restoration business and soon found people wanting to sell him their old stoves.

“I’d buy them and fix them up. People just didn’t know what to do with them,” he said.

“I love finding old parts and putting everything back together,” he said, polishing a nickel-plated ring around one of his black stoves.

Trujillo disassembles each stove and sends parts to be sandblasted in Canon City. He sends other parts to be nickel-plated in Colorado Springs.

Trujillo puts the stoves back together with new bolts and they are ready to go.

The process takes about six months for each stove.

“Sometimes, I work on up to three at a time,” he said with pride.

Trujillo said he has found stoves in old barns, flooded homes and at antique shops across Colorado.

He gets stoves and parts from a place in Fort Morgan that he calls the “Stove Haven.”

“This place has a whole backyard of stoves stacked up. They went through the country collecting them and they saved all the castings,” Trujillo said.

“My nephew went with me there and he tells me that I looked like a kid in a candy store.”

Trujillo, who also is a welder, has a small workshop in his Pueblo West backyard heated by one of the many stoves he’s restored.

His weathered hands tell a tale of a man who knows hard work.

“I wanted to work in every department at Holcim so I could learn about different jobs,” Trujillo said.

His stoves can be purchased from $300 to $2,000.

The oldest stove he’s restored was made in the year 1850. He has stoves made by Cole’s, Estate Oak, Florence, King and Isabel companies, to name a few.

“I’m still at it — slowing down a little — but still at it. I really enjoy doing this work,” Trujillo said.